Tag Archives: drug monitoring program

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is urging physicians to be more careful about their prescribing habits when it comes to potentially addictive painkillers, and is encouraging their participation in the state’s voluntary drug monitoring program. The comments came at a doctors’ conference where the governor described how deeply affected he has been by the recent death of a close friend due to pain medication, according to this article.

Only about 20 to 25 percent of doctors in the state voluntarily use the program, the article says. Meanwhile, treatment centers in the state reported 7,238 admissions for painkiller addictions in 2010, 12 times more than in 2000, the article adds, citing data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

A major doctors’ organization is urging its members to practice greater caution and restraint when prescribing prescription painkillers in light of the abuse epidemic. The American College of Physicians said in a policy letter published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that prescription drug abuse is a “serious public health problem” and that physicians and other health professionals with prescribing privileges play an important role in helping to ensure safe and effective use of drugs like OxyContin and Vicodin.

According to the group, evidence-based, nonbinding guidelines should be established regarding recommended maximum dosage and duration of therapy that a patient taking controlled substance medications may receive.

In addition, the ACP called for the establishment of a national prescription drug monitoring program to help doctors detect and prevent prescription drug abuse by identifying individuals who seek to obtain prescriptions for addictive medications from multiple physicians for themselves or to sell. Former President George W. Bush launched an initiative in 2005 authorizing federal grants for states to establish or enhance PDMPs, the group said, but funding was initially delayed and has been inconsistent.

Forty-nine states have taken measures to implement prescription drug monitoring databases in light of the pill addiction epidemic, but Missouri lacks such a program — despite the fact that it has the seventh highest drug overdose death rate in the country, a majority of which are from prescription drugs, according to this article.

Approximately 3,200 people in Missouri seek treatment for a prescription drug abuse problem each year, and the most commonly used drugs were controlled substances such as Xanax, OxyContin, and Vicodin, the article says, pointing to data from the Missouri Department of Mental Health. Yet efforts to establish a prescription drug monitoring program were stymied when a Missouri senator filibustered the legislation that would have brought the database to the state, citing concerns over patient privacy, the article says.

Overdose deaths involving opioid analgesics have shown a similar increase, the CDC found: starting with 4,030 deaths in 1999, the number of deaths increased to 15,597 in 2009 and 16,651 in 2010. Read more...

The proposed legislation would require coroners to report prescription overdose deaths to the state’s medical board for review, according to the Los Angeles Times, which earlier reported on the nearly 4,000 accidental deaths involving prescription drugs in Southern California and found that in half the cases, drugs that caused or contributed to a death had been prescribed by that person’s physician.

The legislation would also enhance and provide sustained funding for California’s prescription drug monitoring system, known as CURES, which contains detailed data on prescriptions for painkillers, the LA Times said.

Between 2002-2004 and 2008-2010, past year heroin use increased among people reporting past year nonmedical use (PYNMU) of opioid pain relievers, but not among those reporting no PYNMU. Frequent nonmedical users – people reporting 100-365 days of PYNMU – had the highest rate of past year heroin use and were at increased risk for ever injecting heroin and past year heroin abuse or dependence as compared to infrequent nonmedical users (1-29 days of PYNMU).

In 2008-2010, 82.6% of frequent nonmedical users who used heroin in the past year reported nonmedical use of opioid pain relievers prior to heroin initiation compared to 64.1% in 2002-2004. Read more...

The California Senate has given the stamp of approval to a package of bills aimed at reducing prescription drug abuse and overdose deaths, including a measure that would require coroners to report deaths involving prescription drugs to the Medical Board of California. The Los Angeles Times reports that the Senate also signed off on a bill that would upgrade the state’s prescription drug monitoring program, known as CURES. In addition, lawmakers approved a measure that would make it easier for the medical board to investigate physicians suspected of overprescribing and suspend their prescribing privileges, and a bill that would prohibit pharmacies from advertising commonly abused narcotic medications, such as OxyContin and Vicodin, according to the LA Times.

The package of legislation will now move on to the California Assembly for approval.

The CURES bill faced the strongest opposition from the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, the Times says, even though it had the support of a coalition of law enforcement groups, health insurance companies, and business, labor and consumer organizations. That opposition was dropped after the bill’s sponsors removed a provision that called for a tax on drug makers to pay for teams of investigators to crack down on drug-seeking patients and doctors who recklessly prescribe to them, according to the Times. Read more...

A California Senate committee has given the stamp of approval to a package of bills aimed at reducing prescription drug abuse and overdose deaths, including a measure that would require coroners to report deaths involving prescription drugs to the Medical Board of California. The Los Angeles Times reports that the committee also signed off on a bill that would upgrade the state’s prescription drug monitoring program, known as CURES. In addition, the committee approved a measure that would make it easier for the medical board to investigate physicians suspected of overprescribing and suspend their prescribing privileges, and a bill that would prohibit pharmacies from advertising commonly abused narcotic medications, such as OxyContin and Vicodin, according to the LA Times.

Before moving to the Senate floor, all four bills must clear additional committees, the Times said.

The Times recently issued a report finding that the California Medical Board has repeatedly failed to protect patients from reckless prescribing by doctors: it rarely tries to suspend the prescribing privileges of doctors under investigation, and even when it imposes sanctions, in most cases it allows doctors to continue practicing and prescribing. The Times’ examination of board records and county coroners’ files from 2005 through 2011 found that eight doctors disciplined for excessive prescribing later had patients die of overdoses or related causes; prescriptions those doctors wrote caused or contributed to 19 deaths.

Iowa has taken an interesting approach towards stopping the practice of seeking out multiple doctors for painkiller prescriptions with a program that “locks” Medicaid recipients into using one doctor, one pharmacy and one hospital. And according to this article, the program appears to be having some positive results: by locking in more patients, the state saved $14.8 million from July 2010 through September 2012 in the cost of drugs and doctors’ visits.

The number of “locked-in” Iowa Medicaid recipients has increased sevenfold from 200 in 2010 to 1,430 in January, the article says, a jump that came after Iowa Medicaid started screening patients not for just doctor-filled prescriptions, but for non-emergency visits to hospital emergency rooms.

The state’s prescription drug monitoring program was launched in March 2009, but only one-quarter of Iowa doctors and prescribers are registered to use the database, which includes more than 4.2 million prescriptions annually, the article says.

Prescription painkillers caused 62 deaths in Iowa in 2011, up from just four deaths in 2000, while prescription abuse treatment admissions more than quadrupled from 187 in 1999 to 878 in 2009, according to the Iowa Department of Public Health.